Blogger's Meetup

Ok, if I dont do this, now, I’ll never do it: round up of meetup last night. Oh, and has anyone else noticed the guy with the fedora and vest that has been around at every single meetup regardless of where we were? Or is that just my imagination. PLEASE tell me that isn’t just my imagination. Sadly, I don’t have the capacity/time to elaborate on these, so I’m afraid I must apologize for not hitting the standard on this one. If other folks blog the event, I’ll link to their wrapups. (Incidentally, I would have loved to have a laptop during this event to "take minutes" using something fast like MindManager. (www.mindjet.com)

What: AustinBloggers Meetup
When: 2/19/2003 7:00 PM
Where: Spider House (Outside… brrr….)
Who: Adam, Chris, Terry/Paul, Daze, David, Adina, Chip, Jon,
Marsha (owns Jon), Addlepated, Prentiss, Jeremy (jk) Blog forthcoming, right?

Topics:

1. Jon told the worst joke of the year. I can’t even repeat it for fear of losing my mind. Something about why Google bought Pyra because they were Pyro’s or something. Just awful.
2. Prentiss was wearing his new glasses. Prentiss couldn’t find the Mission Control glasses at the store. I’m glad. He would have looked ridiculous. The pair he has suit him.
3. Adam, ever-observant, freaked me out when he noted that EVERYONE was wearing glasses around the table… all 12!
4. Emergent Democracy talk courtesy of Adina & Jon. Adina mentioned how some people believe that once you have a critical mass of people doing things, then you start to see emergent behavior that seems very A.I. Cuck-coo.. Cuck-coo…
5. Google/Blogger gossip. Talked about potential reasons; most compelling was idea that Google could flog its own servers to have up-to-the-second pulse on buzz. Emergent News. Emergent Buzzwords. Inferred Karma (i.e. if your blog consistently has buzzwords 5 hours before news hits, you are a trusted predictor of info). Example Buzzword: "Shock & Awe"
6. Rumor/Urban Legend/Pseudotruth? : US dropped $100 bills from the skies over Iraq to demoralize or to bribe people into helping… "They have so much money they can just dump it out an airplane." It was later found that $100 was so much the people had no concept of what it represented, so later they dropped notes promising "2 goats" for help. I’d take two goats… (Goats have extremely weird eyes, incidentally)
7. Suggested Austin JournalCon topics: Are journalers, bloggers, journalists, poets, etc the same thing? Anonymous vs. Exhibitionist
8. General complaints about venue… too cold, no wireless… Ruta Maya would be better (but too South, thank you very much) and better than MoJo’s
9. Bagged on A-list bloggers… arrogant pricks. Prentiss flat out said he didn’t ever read the A-listers because he figured enough people would blog about what they said that he would read them through osmosis.
10. Prentiss freely admits that he spams other blogs’ comments.
11. Lots of people are getting SPAM in their REFERRER LOGS?!?!? EH?
12. Adam gave a good ol’ college try to explain Reversible. It was cute, but I’m still as confused as ever.
13. Stratas of bloggers: A-listers/rock stars, community nodes around locale, interest, etc. LiveJournalers… who are we kidding… we’re ALL at the bottom.
14. Ben Brown Bashing. Doesn’t like to associate with bloggers but does like to insult people that go into his MOO… or make people THINK that’s him insulting us… layers and layers of irony…
15. While Addlepated played Pong on her Atari 2600, Adina played Ping-Pong on her Ping-Pong table. Analog-style. Poor thing.
16. Chip abuses his Sim family, named Clones, by helping them burn down their backyard; I paraphrase, "They are so stupid, that I figured if I gave them a BBQ, then it was only a matter of time before disaster." They are evil. They drown their neighbors in a 2×2 swimming pool. Then they are haunted by the ghosts of their dead friends and never get to sleep. Chip giggled and giggled as he talked about his Sims.
17. I think I’m going to reevaluate my friendship with Chip.
18. And I have a whole new level of respect for Chip for going through all the trouble to illustrate his story. And categorizing it as "My Happy Life."
19. Chris explained the fallacy of SMS Text Messaging in the USA. It seems the target audience can’t drive.
20. "Performance Art" space next to Ruta Maya = Expose’
21. Adam talked about the project someone did categorizing every item in their house. I fantasized about having a "Help David get Dressed" feature on the blog so that people can do "Am I hot or not"-style voting to help refine the wardrobe.
22. Adina, more entreprenurial, saw the value of obsessively categorizing your possessions by creating direct links to eBay.
23. Speaking of eBay- Elvis’ Warts (how do you authenticate???)
24. geocaching (I swear it’s come up every single time… )
25. Austinbloggers "day"/48-hours. Topic "What would you do with 4 hours of spare time in Austin?" (And, no, Addlepated, SLEEP is not a valid answer) To be held upcoming Sun/Mon… MORE INFO FORTHCOMING at www.austinbloggers.org
26. Daze Reader talked about traffic… web traffic, that is… and spikes in web traffic. He looks nothing at all like you would expect from his site, by the way. Nothing at all. And that’s a VERY good thing.
27. Google Images CAN be dirty. Jeremy assured us that when you turn off parental filtering in google image filtering, it’s awesome. I’ll take his word for it… well… maybe I oughta check for myself.
28. Terry/Paul is having a controversy with his austinmayor site.
29. Prentiss wants to create an archive of New Yorker postings.
30. Adam scolded me for not doing full content in RSS feeds.
31. Links: isbn.nu, allconsuming.net, iwishyouwish.com, overture.com
32. Chip promises a geeky article on Amazon references via IEEE.
33. Searchking Case
34. script kiddies, honeypots, and forms.
35. (sigh)…. (it pains me to type this, really it does)… and of course… Christina Aguilera Nipple Futures.

Did I miss anything important?

All in all, it was one of the better Meetups, yet. It was chilly outside, so that wasn’t all that great (actually cut the night a little shorter than usual). The conversation was lively, an order of magnitude less geeky than usual (intentionally, I think)… which isn’t saying much. Lots of jokes… lots of gentle ribbing… A couple of new faces. Reasonably distributed conversation/talking stick among folks.

We’re starting to form community, it seems.

Excellent. All going according to plan…. Soon it will be time to pass out the running shoes and jello. See you behind the comet!

Modified: 02.20.03.2047 – fixed Adina’s link